fraudwatchers.org
The following (verified) people have been significantly associated with this entity, either as a participant, contributor, promoter, or beneficiary, according to our OSINT research:
Reviews:
Ian is from South Africa, who claims to have run a small ISP company there called Connectica before being hired into corporate America in Florida in the late 1990s... after several years, he claims he decided to get out of the rat race and re-launch the Connectica brand as a small SEO/marketing agency (which is weird, since it's a totally different industry) That's all fine and well, but Ian is also the "owner" of pretty much all the websites under the "419 Eater" community of sites... besides the AA419 site (which seems to have it's own ties to Netherlands/Afrikaner/South Africa) which is owned by Derek Smythe: https://hucksters.net/person/derek-smythe There is some crossover between the people, mostly Gen-X age hacktivists, who were/are involved in these communities. One moderator "Michelle Banks" appears to be real, although might be using a fake name.. she's quite active on Twitter and seems to genuinely hunt scammers... interestingly, I found both a UK and Florida address for her, which may or may not be accurate. But the truth is that Ian's tech skills are unremarkable these days... despite trying desperately to hide his name from his projects, it's easily traceable with some basic research. The problem is that if you're going to run a network of anti-fraud websites but HIDE your identity from them and use fake names all over the place, it makes you look very suspicious if not fraudulent yourself... And alas, many people have accused Ian of extortion (accepting money in exchange for deleting content from his website network that was damaging to the people mentioned). I don't have any direct evidence of those claims being true. It's possible Ian just wanted to hide his name while he was in the corporate world and then after he had a small business, he decided it was better to keep on the down-low. What I do know is that I tested Scam Warners by logging in and reporting a fraudulent story that involved myself, and it was immediately deleted by mods... when I asked them why via email, [he] responded, saying my fraud experience was "off-topic" which of course doesn't make much sense, and followed with "Don't bother replying, or trying to re-register I'm not interested in having you as a member of the forum". So it would seem that Ian tries to bizarrely direct the type of content on his sites (apparently certain "scam warnings" are not welcome on his site, while any random thing his mods post about are okay), but it also places serious doubt on the claims that he "collects negative info" on tons of people to extort them with later. He also emailed me (it seems) using the fake name "Alan Jones" and there are Admin profiles on his sites using names like "Emma Jones" and "Mike Wilson" which I suspect are all owned by Ian and/or his wife Jane. You simply don't have this many fake aliases and profiles unless you're purposefully muddying the waters. I don't think the extortion claims are true, and most of the complaints about Ian are probably from scammers who are angry they got caught... but dude, you can't be using a half-dozen fake identites ON YOUR OWN WEBSITES for 1-2 decades while claiming to be fighting fraud, it just doesn't work that way. Read More